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WERE these frightened reactions in any way justified? Schrecker acknowledges
that leaders of the Party -- secretive, contentious, pawns of Moscow -- were
sometimes their own worst enemies. But she nevertheless concludes that the fear
of Reds in America was vastly exaggerated. Critically evaluating the so-called
Venona documents (recently released decrypts of messages sent from the United
States to Moscow by Communist agents during the Second World War), she agrees
that Julius Rosenberg recruited an espionage ring. Moscow seems to have
welcomed data from the ring about radar, jet planes, and other advanced
weapons. But Rosenberg's people (unlike Klaus Fuchs, the physicist-spy who
worked on the Manhattan Project) divulged no useful information concerning the
atomic bomb. Indeed, very few members of the CPUSA seem to have engaged in
spying. (Schrecker thinks that the jury is still out concerning Alger Hiss.)
Many Are the Crimes concludes that the prosecution's evidence against
Ethel Rosenberg was weak, and that the government colluded with the judge to
ensure that both Rosenbergs would receive the death penalty. This draconian
sentence amounted to "judicial murder."

Having detailed America's anti-Communist excesses in the late 1940s, Schrecker
brings McCarthy onstage three fifths of the way through her drama. He appears
as a bit player whose role was to "ratchet up the intensity" of an already
fevered crusade -- he was the "creature," not the "creator," of the Red scare.
McCarthy was a shameless liar who claimed to have flown on thirty-two combat
missions in the war though he had flown on no more than two, and to walk with a
limp from "ten pounds of shrapnel" though he had hurt his foot at a party.
McCarthy, Schrecker reminds us, was so reckless that even Hoover ceased to
cooperate with him by mid-1953. For these reasons she allots only twenty-five
pages to his activities.

In relegating McCarthy to the wings, Schrecker is correct to stress that the
Wisconsin senator was a Joe-come-lately to the anti-Communist cause. But her
sketchy treatment of McCarthy belies her title, and she skims too rapidly over
many highlights of the Red scare after 1950, including the confused and
sometimes craven responses of the Eisenhower Administration to the boorish
senator who nearly dominated American politics for four years.

I have other, larger reservations about Schrecker's book. Piling up details
about the sins of the anti-Communist crusaders, Schrecker concludes with a long
and labored chapter highlighting the ravages of the Red scare, not only from
1945 to 1955 but also in the forty-odd years since then. She would have us
believe that McCarthyism "destroyed the left" (Irving Howe, among others, has
argued that the CPUSA, blindly following Moscow during the tense years of the
Cold War, bears much of that responsibility) and has badly corrupted much of
American life since the 1950s -- scholarship, scientific research, publishing,
philanthropy, films, social reform, labor unions, and the civil-rights and
women's movements. She contends that anti-Communist excesses in the 1940s
offered the model for repression of the Black Panthers in the 1960s, for Ronald
Reagan's double-dealing concerning the Iran-contra scandal, and for Watergate.
McCarthyism promoted a general "sleaziness" -- its "main legacy" -- that has
blighted American politics since that time.

Has McCarthyism had such profound, long-range effects? Schrecker pauses here
and there to remind us that many forces have coalesced to cause the
decline -- as she wants to see it -- in the quality of American life since the 1950s. But she then presses on with prosecutorial zeal, essentially dismissing her own caveats, to identify McCarthyism as the source of all manner of subsequent sins.

Schrecker's gloomy indictment leaves the impression that virtually all elites
succumbed to the hysteria of the time. Almost no one, it seems, displayed
courage. Such a view tends to ignore people who deplored what was happening.
The historian Bernard De Voto spoke for many Americans in decrying Hoover's use
of "gossip, rumor, slander, backbiting, malice and drunken invention, which,
when it makes the headlines, shatters the reputations of innocent and harmless
people.... We know that the thing stinks to heaven, that it is an
avalanching danger to our society." Schrecker says little about Americans who
tried to distinguish between Soviet foreign policy, which seemed highly
dangerous in the postwar era, and communism within America, which seemed hardly
dangerous at all. Members of the Americans for Democratic Action, which
receives only cursory attention here, were among the people who sought (at
least at times) to make this distinction and to distance themselves from
excesses of the Red scare at home while remaining firm in their anti-communism
abroad.

Readers of Schrecker's book will also have a hard time understanding what
non-elites were doing and thinking during these troubled times. Her
account does not look at public-opinion polls or electoral results, and it does
little to explore the sources of McCarthyism. Can it be said that Red-hunters
enjoyed considerable support among religious people who loathed "Godless
communism"? Did McCarthy have special appeal among Catholic believers? (John F.
Kennedy, scarcely mentioned in the book, seems to have thought so.) What about
Americans with backgrounds and relatives in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe? In
the absence of solid documentation on the wider world of anti-communism, it is
unfortunate that Schrecker's ambitious book focuses so relentlessly on the
elites -- the bad guys -- and fails to dig deeper into the significant social
foundations of the postwar American right.

Finally, readers may wonder how the elites managed to develop such power at the
time. Were the American people ignorant, hapless pawns of Red-baiters? Missing
here is a serious account of how Americans in the 1940s and 1950s perceived the
political and military ambitions of the Soviet Union. Although Schrecker
repeatedly mentions "the Cold War," she tends to treat it as an abstract,
offstage problem that undermined the good sense of people. There is no
discussion, for instance, of the coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin airlift, or
Soviet brutalities in Eastern Europe. Korea gets a few lines here and there but
is equated with Vietnam as something that involved the United States in "years
of bloody, fruitless warfare." By downplaying the international dimensions of
the domestic Red scare (dimensions that featured in the sensational Hiss case),
Schrecker robs her story of vitally important context and relegates a
generation of elites to the psychiatrist's couch.

THE Soviet World of American Communism, which focuses on the
international activities of leaders of the CPUSA from 1919 to the mid-1940s,
offers a different point of view. Harvey Klehr, a professor of politics and
history at Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, a historian of
twentieth-century politics at the Library of Congress, are productive scholars
who have already written several books critical of the CPUSA. In 1995 they
published, with the Russian historian Fridrikh Firsov, The Secret World of
American Communism, a collection (with extensive annotation and commentary)
of newly available documents from Moscow. These documents included information
about espionage by the CPUSA, thereby providing much more solid evidence about
such activities than scholars had suspected existed. Secret World was
the first of twenty-five proposed volumes in Yale University Press's ambitious
"Annals of Communism" series -- books all to be based on documents in the Soviet
Union. Klehr and Haynes have now teamed up with Kyrill Anderson, a Russian
archivist, to dig into records in Moscow of the Communist International
(Comintern) and the CPUSA. They reprint ninety-five documents, many in full,
choosing those that focus on "previously unknown or unexpected aspects" of the
relation between the CPUSA and the Comintern. Their extensive notes cite many
additional documents.

The authors repeatedly slam home their central point: American Communist
leaders (and many of the rank and file) checked their brains in Moscow. A few
brief quotations will capture both their thesis and their unbending tone: "The
CPUSA was never an independent political organization"; "The dictates of the
Comintern almost invariably superseded policies offered [by the CPUSA] on the
basis of local conditions"; "One finds no documents in the Soviet archives ...
that show American Communist leaders refusing to carry out Comintern orders
as a matter of principle"; "Both the CPUSA leaders and the rank and file
absorbed Stalin's ideological hatreds as their own"; American Communists wore
"special glasses that allowed them to see only what Moscow saw and that
rendered all else invisible." For these reasons the CPUSA was in fact
"'un-American.'"

According to these documents, CPUSA leaders' subservience to Moscow was total.
American Communist officials all but invited the Comintern to choose their
leaders, and they acquiesced in sharp turns of Soviet policy -- for example, the
Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 -- that appalled many Party members in the United
States. Klehr et al. argue that top officials of the CPUSA offered no protests
against the brutal purges and killings orchestrated by Stalin against his
enemies (including some wayward American Communists in the Soviet Union) in the
1930s. The documents also reveal that the CPUSA often depended heavily on
funding ("Moscow gold") from the Soviet Union. As late as 1988 the Soviet Union
contributed $3 million to the Party in the United States.

This may not, of course, be the whole story: further research into the enormous
Soviet archives may alter the record as given here. Moreover, Klehr and his
co-authors sometimes draw larger and questionable conclusions not supported by
the documents they print. A case in point concerns a group of Finnish-Americans
and Finnish-Canadians who were recruited by Moscow in the 1930s to help rebuild
the Karelia region of the Soviet Union, near Finland. Many of these people were
apparently executed in the late 1930s by Soviet authorities, but Klehr et al.
find no documents indicating that CPUSA leaders intervened or protested against
what was happening. The authors' evidence for the killings, however, comes
from accusations in subsequently written memoirs by family members and from
survivors -- not from the archives. No document offered here unambiguously
implicates the CPUSA of the time in knowledge of or a cover-up of such
atrocities.

In general, Klehr and his colleagues support a thesis that is neither new nor
surprising. As early as 1957, in The Roots of American Communism,
Theodore Draper established authoritatively that Moscow called the shots for
the American Communist hierarchy in the years following the Bolshevik
Revolution. We have long known that leaders of the CPUSA obeyed the Soviet
Party line thereafter, no matter how dramatically that line changed. As
Schrecker's book shows, such obeisance played nicely into the hands of Hoover
and his fellow Red-hunters in the 1940s and 1950s.

What Soviet World does not do, however, is establish a broader point
that it sometimes seems to advance: that lower-level American Communists more
or less blindly followed their leaders. Indeed, as periodic defections from
communism in America indicated, not all Party members sold their souls forever.
Rather, many were leftists and radicals who had joined the CPUSA during the
Great Depression, when the Soviet Union seemed to them to be the only hope
against the spread of fascism. Others became members at that time because they
had given up on capitalism or because they thought the Party offered the best
chance for improvements in working conditions. Communists were strong, for
instance, in several CIO unions in the late 1930s and early 1940s. By the late
1940s thousands of such people had left the Party -- some e becausthey were
disillusioned with its stands on foreign policy after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of
1939 and during the Cold War, others because they had regained some faith in
the capitalist system. One of the great ironies of the postwar Red scare is
that it broke out while defections from the CPUSA were proliferating.

Communism also developed considerable strength in the 1930s among writers and
intellectuals. Whittaker Chambers, who broke with the Party and accused Hiss of
espionage, was one. In Hollywood, Party members in the 1930s included Elia
Kazan, Budd Schulberg, and Carl Foreman (later the scenarist for High
Noon). Ring Lardner Jr., who was to become one of the "Hollywood Ten" sent
to jail by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (and later the
screenwriter for the movie M*A*S*H), also had joined the Party in the
Depression years. Like thousands of others, these people abandoned the CPUSA.
Most of them lamented that they had been obtuse about the Party's submission to
dictates from Moscow. But (unlike Chambers) many also continued to support
liberal or radical causes.

The experience of one-time Party members like these indicates that scholars are
well advised to explore the activities of the CPUSA in the context of broader
histories: of ethnic and religious groups, race relations, labor unions, and
intellectual life generally in the United States. There were many "worlds" of
American communism, not just the small, often pathetic one of the Party
leadership.

To be sure, Klehr and his co-authors set a narrower task for themselves than
this. They try to tell only part of a larger, complicated story. But even more
than Schrecker, they seem eager to prosecute a case -- one that threatens to
conflate leadership and followership within the Communist Party of the United
States. The minefields that have proved so treacherous for earlier scholars of
communism and the postwar Red scare still remain to be cleared.